Mercy Helps Two East Coast Hospitals with EHR Implementation

January 8, 2017

By Mercy's Jennifer Harutunian

CaroMont Health, based in Gastonia, North Carolina, and Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury, Maryland, recently completed electronic health record (EHR) installations with the help of Mercy Technology Services, the IT division of one of the nation’s largest catholic health systems.

Peninsula Regional Medical Center (PRMC), with its wide spectrum of specialty and subspecialty services, needed a single patient record platform to help coordinate patient care. With the launch of its new EHR on November 1, Peninsula (292 beds) now has that integrated platform. “Everyone is on the same page, literally, with every patient,” said Dr. Christopher Snyder, chief medical technology officer and hospitalist at PRMC. “It’s one patient, one chart – communication will be greatly improved.”

Peninsula contracted with Mercy to supplement its staff, finding in Mercy a team of specialists that has installed this EHR in more than 50 hospitals. “With the addition of Mercy’s team members to our own, we had the right cast of people to finish on schedule and keep project costs in check, said Bruce Ritchie, PRMC’s chief financial officer.”

CaroMont Health, which includes CaroMont Regional Medical Center (435 beds) and a network of 46 primary and specialty physician offices, partnered with Mercy to install its EHR across its entire system. The medical center went live with its new EHR in August 2015; its clinics and physician offices are live as of October of this year. CaroMont chose to install Mercy’s build of Epic; a version that has a decade of optimizations and design input from the people who use it daily. Just last month, Mercy was one of only three other health care providers to be recognized for its comprehensive build-out of more than 700 items within the EHR software that lead to better care.

“CaroMont started with Mercy’s system design, which is a quantum leap when you consider how many years we’ve put into it; then we customized their system even further,” said Gil Hoffman, Mercy’s chief information officer (CIO).

Early results at CaroMont show an 83% decrease in the use of dictation since their new EHR went live, as well as a decrease in transcription services and associated operational costs.

“In Mercy, we found trusted advisors who shared their lessons to help our success,” said Mike Johnson, CaroMont’s CIO. “It was an effective partnership.”

Mercy's EHR expert Cynthia Porter (right) brings her 30+ years of nursing experience to every implementation.

Mercy, named one of the top five large U.S. health systems in 2017 by Truven, an IBM Watson Health company, serves millions annually. Mercy includes 44 acute care and specialty (heart, children’s, orthopedic and rehab) hospitals, more than 700 physician practices and outpatient facilities, 40,000 co-workers and more than 2,000 Mercy Clinic physicians in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Mercy also has outreach ministries in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

MTS provides and manages technology solutions forMercy, the nation’s first health care provider accredited by Epic, to offer a full suite of electronic health record solutions to other hospitals, including Epic in the cloud, implementation and optimization. MTS’ award-winning data analytics integrate care delivery, manage costs and support a model of care that keeps patients healthier and out of the hospital. Visitmercytechnology.net.